The 2009 X-Force Trend and Risk Report is now available. This latest report from IBM X-Force reveals three main threats that demonstrate how, in 2009, attackers seeking to steal money or personal data increasingly targeted their victims via the Internet.

Vulnerability disclosures for document readers and editors also continued to soar. Of the two predominant types of document vulnerabilities - Office documents including spreadsheets and presentations and Portable Document Format (PDF) documents - the latter has continued to dominate the charts.

The appearance of new malicious Web links has skyrocketed globally in the past year.

Phishing attacks, or sending email that falsely claims to be from a legitimate organization, also increased dramatically in the second half of 2009. It surpassed the monthly volume seen in 2008, with activity coming from countries that had not previously been in the game